Blurbed!

I was never much of a baseball player, but there was a brief time in the late 1970s when I would have totally plotzed if Carl Yastrzemski told me I had a good swing.

He’s no Roger Geiger or Joel Carpenter, but Yaz was my hero for a while…

That’s about what I’m feeling like today, reading the blurbs for my upcoming book.

I don’t know how they did it, but the folks at Oxford Press have cajoled some heavy hitters in the fields of higher-educational and evangelical history into writing a few words for the book jacket.

Roger Geiger is the undisputed Grand Pooh-Bah of higher-ed history. His recent book The History of American Higher Education has become the new go-to source on the topic. Joel Carpenter packs a double punch as author and academic organizational wizard. He now works at Calvin College as director of the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity. He’s also a prolific author, and his book Revive Us Again defined the parameters of the study of twentieth-century evangelical history in the USA. Daniel K. Williams is a younger historian, but he has already distinguished himself as a leading scholar of our generation. His two best-known books are God’s Own Party and Defenders of the Unborn. I lean heavily on God’s Own Party in Fundamentalist U and Dan helped me a great deal as I was writing and revising my book.

Here’s what these three larger-than-life nerd heroes had to say about my book:

“Adam Laats’s history of the development of evangelical and fundamentalist higher education reveals a complex interaction between religious and academic values. The colleges, universities, and Bible Institutes that he examines contained deep differences regarding both spheres. As a sympathetic observer and an objective reporter, Laats captures the conflicts and the abiding strengths of faith-based institutions as they wrestle with the challenges of modernity and their own internecine quarrels.” –Roger L. Geiger, author of The History of American Higher Education: Culture and Learning from the Founding to World War II

“Fundamentalist and conservative evangelical colleges face unique tensions. They represent volatile movements plagued by internal struggles and ever-shifting boundaries. They pursue higher learning on behalf of a movement that accused America’s universities of betraying God’s truth and righteousness. And they function as halfway houses for evangelical students who are called to be in the world, but not of it. Adam Laats went deep into the archives of Bob Jones University, Wheaton College, Moody Bible Institute, Biola University, Liberty University and Gordon College, and he tells their stories with great integrity. The result is a major contribution to the history of Christian higher education and to the understanding of fundamentalism and evangelicalism in America.” –Joel Carpenter, Director of the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity, Calvin College

“Adam Laats’s nuanced, detailed, and exceptionally well researched history of twentieth-century conservative Protestant higher education offers a plethora of fascinating information and perceptive insights. It is essential reading even for those well versed in American evangelical history, because it offers a fresh analysis of the complex ways in which fundamentalist colleges reflected (and shaped) their religious movement’s tenuous balance between the demands of the world and the tenets of faith.” –Daniel K. Williams, author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right